Edward J. Valauskas is Chief Editor and Founder of First Monday. He teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. Edward is also Curator of Rare Books at the Chicago Botanic Garden. He is the founder and principal of Internet Mechanics, a technology consulting group which since 1993 has been advising schools, libraries, government agencies, and corporations on telecommunications, computing, and the Internet. Edward has written and edited several books on computing and the Internet.

Edward has a life?long interest in paleontology and related fields. He was a Shinner Fellow in the Department of Geology at the Field Museum of Natural History, a Summer Student Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution, and a graduate student in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Edward is shown in the image above at the Field Museum of Natural History in August, 1969 while a Shinner Fellow. He is pictured in the invertebrate paleontological collections of the Museum, holding a slab of fossil crinoids. This image (Negative Number GN81691) is reproduced with the kind permission of the Field Museum of Natural History.